MY NEURODIVERGENT LIFE
Jessica Lawrence is a full time artist with a popular webcomic called “Tiger Jess.”
My name is Jessica, and when I was 17 I was officially diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
After a two hour session with a psychiatrist, I was at last given an answer for a life’s worth of pain. Up until that point, I had hidden most of my major symptoms from my parents; the overloads, the meltdowns, the severe anxiety, and so on.
So when I finally got a name for my pain and learned it was incurable, I did what any maladjusted teen would do and had a full blown panic attack.
From then on I slowly stopped hiding the pain. I was already in counseling for PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) after a major spinal operation, so I had some guidance already.
Thus, I began researching into ways on how to cope with everyday things; noises that seemed to hurt, my unshakeable fear of cars, how to communicate when I lost the ability to talk, and so on. But most things I researched turned up a hundred and one articles for parents, and how to “calm that pesky ol’ ASD (autism spectrum disorder) kid”.
Apparently autistic adults were few and far between, and female autistic adults even harder to find. It’s been speculated that I have a condition linked to autism that causes me to feel pain with much more intensity than the average person, so monthly cramps and everything associated with them was driving me to insanity. I did find some other autistic females talking in an online forum about the correlation between meltdowns and periods, so that settled my panic a little.
But it’s been seven years since my diagnosis, and I’ve hoarded a lot of information and learned a lot of my own ways of dealing with life as an autistic adult. So I’m going to write about them once a week, each article centred around a different topic, and finishing with a mobile game review of games that I feel calm or distract me!
GAME OF THE WEEK 😍👾
My game this week is I Love Hue, which I play on my android tablet. It’s a colour-matching game where you sort out squares into their gradient between certain colours.
The game uses in-game currency called prisms, and starts you off with about ninety of them. A purchase of any prism pack (the lowest price being €2.05) also removes ads so you won’t have to wait between some levels to get back to the game — which is handy for me because I need calming now dangit, I don’t want to watch your ad for Toy Bubble Pop Bonanza or whatever the heck it is.
It’s a beautiful game, and when you do better than average on a level it compliments you! I got called a majestic butterfly and it made me feel warm inside.
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